If you could give advice to anyone who is ten years younger than you or when they were ten years younger than now, what would you tell them?
(This thread is a rehash of this thread, with the difference that you can give advice to any non-public figure you want from 10 years ago too, regardless of how old they are.)
(Also assuming they take you seriously, interpret it correctly, don't forget it immediately, don't cause a butterfly effect for doing so, etc...)
Advice for any generic 5-year old:
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If you don't know already, learn to write.
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If you don't know already, learn to read. (Neither of these are likely in most places but whatever.)
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If your parents tell you to not talk to strangers, what they mean by that is "don't talk to adults, unknown people who offer you things (which rarely happens anyway, lol) or people minding their own business." Most importantly, none of these apply to you current, or future classmates. Talk to them about things you might share in common.
(I would also include something about how watching children's cartoons are a utter waste of time but I have no replacement for those and I suspect only their parents would.)
Advice for me, 10 years ago:
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Pay attention to your future school material to make sure you don't lose it and call your teacher and interrupt class for everyone else.
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Some people will be very rude to you. You should probably tell your mom about it when you're home so she can tell the school staff about it. (You won't have time to tell your school staff unless you want to say that in fron of the people who will be rude to you.
Also I have no clue if the staff will do anything about it.) -
Crying will often attract those people to you and give them satisfaction, it's better to do it at home to your parents. (Also, those people shouldn't dictate the morality of crying.)
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If you hear a word you don't know about from your classmates, it might refer to someone's genitals, particularly If it starts with X. (
like a 5-year old would know what genitals are but anyway)
Some people will tell you or pressure you to do dumb things. ('Dumb' being needlessly harmful to others or humiliating to you.) Don't listen to them. (I have no clue how they will react to this however.)
To my mother, 10 years ago:
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In the future, it will be unanimous consensus that you should track everything your child does on the internet until they're a teenager and not have them spend more than like, 2 hours there. I'm not kidding about this.
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This is the ideal time to introduce your child to chores apparently.
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Telling your child to not talk to strangers will be a mistake, because your child will also assume 'strangers' to be his classmates, which is bad for obvious reasons. By 'strangers' you mean "adults, unknown people who offer you things (Have you ever seem this happen? Serious question.) or people minding their own business."
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Your child being autistic will mean your child will need more elaborate explanations for following social norms than most people.
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Children can often have their mouths not grow enough, and lack room for teeth to organize themselves properly. This will happen to your child, and if you wait too long, your child will have terrible teeth and need to use braces and palatal expanders to fix it, like your husband.
(I would probably also include something about my grandma dying of cancer, but my mom has never had problems with spending time with her parents so it's not really advice.)
I thought way too much about this when I had my first child.
I wrote up all the advice I would want the little nibblet to have (in case I carked it) and after catching some Zzzzs and after reviewing this incredibly long list I realized the list was not only incredibly dull, but also totally useless.
I've never, in my entire life, thought "Gee, I am so glad I gave that advice."
Advice is typically ignored.
If advice is followed and works out well, you get no credit.
If advice is followed and bad things happen, you get all the blame.
There is also significant amounts of advice already out there.
You can probably think of thousands of quotes, sayings, cliches...
I figured, the difference between knowledge and wisdom is one of personal experience.
So I go with stories. I tell my kid stories from my past and present. I figure stories are a shared experience of sorts. Lately I have run out of new stories that have an obvious point and I started scraping the bottom of the barrel.
For instance, that time someone on reddit was asking for moderators, and was brutally honest that it was a thankless job, you didn't get paid for it, and would live to regret it. It's a bad sales pitch (or maybe a good one, I sure remembered it.)
Then I net out what I think a good sales pitch is.
Then we practice a good sales pitch on his mum.
Instead of asking for a handheld mixer and explaining the features of the mixer he wanted, he started off with saying he wanted to bake more delicious cookies, but in order to do that more easily and often he would need a handheld mixer....
I'll tell one more story, to illustrate my point. The friends that I still visit after a number of decades, are the friends I made at Uni. I still have contact details for some high school friends, I also have contact details from work friends, but it is the friends I made at University that really stayed tried and true. Plus a few friends who I made when I was new to the USA, who curiously had never been to University.
So that is my advice. If you are going to give advice, be sneaky and make it seem like not-advice.
I’m actually not sure what point you’re trying to make with that story.
Go to Uni. Spend a year in the dorms. Make friends. Keep in contact with them. (It gets harder to make friends as you get older.)
I always hated when my parents did this. I could never understand the point they were trying to make, whereas if they just told me, I would have at least understood even if I disagreed.
That's why I'm just going to tell my kids that there's no point to my story, it's just an awesome story that no one else will listen to.
Work on your body. Not a ton, but don't ignore it completely either.
The habits required to build up a healthy body take years to assimilate. Just... Eat a bit healthier, find a sport you like (keep searching if you haven't found one yet), and dedicate some real time to it.
The longer you wait to do this, the more difficult and long it will be to fix once you eventually do come to terms with it.
To past me:
Oof, if I had to narrow it down to a single item to tell myself, I'd struggle between these two.
"Half of your relationships with women don't need to happen and you're better off alone (at least for a while). You'll hurt people you shouldn't be hurting, and will suffer things that won't teach you anything. Here's a short list of names and locations to avoid. Just stay home and masturbate.
Maybe put a little more effort with the remaining ones. They're probably worth it. IDK."
Did you really have that many relationships that you didn't grow and learn from?
I'm all for avoiding toxic people but I can't think of a single girl or guy I've dated which I didn't learn from. I've had shitty relationships, I've had awful ones, toxic ones, but I learned from all of them and they make me, i believe, a pretty good person today -- someone whose shoes I'm happy to fill.
And i don't think I'm particularly lucky; in fact I've had pretty lousy luck overall on that front. But half just seems like a big number.
Dude, I had a lot of relationships. A lot :P
I wouldn't mind if you elaborated on what you did learn, then. If it's not too private to share :)
I repeated a lot of situations that did not add anything new to me, only renewing old grievances. That is what I mean by a relationship that don't teach anything new.
Romantic entanglements that could be erased from the past without any loss.
There are also situations that teach you things that are wrong and must be corrected.
The one thing I never learned was how to be comfortable by myself.
What I learned? Enough to make it hard to sum up. I don't think my emotional development would be complete without relationships. I was a borderline psychopath before my first girlfriend.
There are a lot of simple and straightforward tokens of wisdom that I heard many times without internalizing them. I'm sure I absorbed some advice easily enough, but I like being contradictory. I like being cynical. I don't want to do something just because it's common advice. Maybe others are like this, or maybe this is mostly my problem. Ironically, I'm a pretty normal person. I get caught up in most cultural events just like everyone else.
So whatever advice I'd give to a younger version of myself or a younger person would be based around building the means to find your own advice. The best words that come to mind are:
"Go out there. Do something. Anything. Just make sure it's what you want to do and you feel like you're going forward."
There is a Coursera course which touches on this subject kind of. It's called Learning How To Learn. I've heard from everyone who's ever taken it that it's worth taking.
Advice to myself 10 years ago:
Don't get married to her. She turned out to be an extremely horrible person who only showed her true colors in the end. You can do much better, and even if you don't, you're better off alone.
Keep working on your certifications. Stop fucking with your hair, and start taking hair loss shit now. Be more consistent with the gym. All of the false starts are basically doing nothing for you.
Advice for others: Concentrate on your physical fitness. Your body is a machine, and it deserves to be cared for and maintained if you want it to perform for you.
Get enough sleep, and maintain a consistent sleep schedule. It's one of the most crucial things for mental health.
Don't hold on to things, both physical and metaphysical. Objects just tend to accumulate and most of them aren't useful. Feelings as well. Holding on to anger, pain, and sadness is useless. Accept them and move past them.
Hang out with Grampa, he's only got a couple years left.
Eat more vegetables.
Give running a shot (you'll love it, I promise!), but never run barefoot, even if you DO forget your running shoes.
At my age "10 years younger" is barely different from where I am now. I'd mostly tell myself, "stay the course, it's only going to get better."
Now 20 years ago me, I might have more to say. Part of me would want to tell 20 years ago me that the business isn't going to work out. It's not going to fail, but it will never amount to much. But the thing is, if I didn't run my business, I wouldn't have gotten my current job which has worked out very well. It's interesting, it more than pays the bills, and it brought me someplace I love.
I'd also tell 20 years ago me to stop wasting time talking to your family (that is parents and brothers). They're toxic and you should move on. I kind of already knew it by that time but was keeping up appearances because I thought it was the right thing to do. I know now that it wasn't.
Do you think you've stopped learning, if you've stopped making enough mistakes to recall?
Not by a long shot. I'm still learning plenty, and I still make mistakes. However, the mistakes tend to be more contained and smaller. Some of it is probably because I no longer feel like I need to prove anything to anyone, so I'm not constantly trying to outdo myself. Some of it is probably because I'm less concerned about how I look when I make a mistake. And a lot of it is because making mistakes is how you learn and grow, so if I told myself not to make some of them, I wouldn't have gotten this far. I'd say the mistakes I'm making today feel much less stupid than the mistakes I made in the past.
If you're going to be hungover, you might as well get paid for it.
Advice for me - go find the best competition you can and play way more soccer.
Advice for others would ideally be tailored to the individual, but one generally useful bit of advice would be - learn how to be comfortable in solitude. I'd accompany it with Pascal 's quote: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
As someone that does very well in a room alone, I'm curious what this means to other people. Is the idea that people are best off isolating themselves from everyone else?
It's not just the alone piece, it's the sitting quietly piece too. I've always understood it to essentially mean that we mostly don't resist our lizard brain impulses well enough to grow. Solitude isn't necessarily desirable in and of itself, but in small, regular doses it at least forces you to deal with yourself. See buddhism, meditation, etc.
Not my own advice, but instead from a hypothetical commencement speech written by Mary Schmich for the Chicago Tribune titled 'Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young' (AKA 'Wear Sunscreen'), that has stuck with me all these years. There is even an amazing reading of it, directed by Baz Luhrmann, that aired on VH1 back in the day that I highly recommend watching:
Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)
And here's the text of it, for those who prefer reading it themselves:
"Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re gone." hits especially close to home for me too, and I wish I had taken that more to heart. I used to do taekwondo, BJJ, skiing, snowboarding, rollerblading, and live a pretty active lifestyle overall... but I simply can't do most of that anymore thanks to how badly I fucked my knees up over the years (including tearing my LCL). :(
And the other advice I really want to highlight is this line:
The most fulfilling adventures in my life all took place while I was travelling, and living+working in other cities around the world. The only thing I regret is that I didn't travel even more when I was younger and more physically/mentally able to, since I still have quite a lot of places left on my bucket list! :)